Breastfeeding in the Park

NOTICE: Unlike most of my stories, there is no sex at all in this one. It is my entry in the 2012 Earth Day Contest, so please read it and, if you like it, vote accordingly. I also appreciate any comments readers care to make.

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Jessica Graf, a 27 year old mother of a baby son, loves going to the park in her neighborhood and pushing Frederick, her four month old son in his shiny new stroller. Ever since she and her husband arrived in the United States from their native Germany, seven months earlier, she has made new friends, because almost everybody likes her. Part of this is because most people like, and even feel protective toward women in advanced stages of pregnancy or new mothers, and part of it was because of her outgoing manner and good looks. She has blonde hair, blue eyes and fair skin, and large breasts, which were big even before she became pregnant.

The other lessees in her upscale apartment building usually tend to be rather stand-offish, but they developed feelings of affection for the pregnant young immigrant in their midst. Once she gave birth to her son, those feelings grew stronger for her and the baby, who was named after his paternal grandfather.

The park is owned by the city and, technically, anybody can go there, but most of the people who use it live in apartments in the many surrounding high-rises. The small patch of greenery is laid out in the shape of a rectangle, occupies several city blocks and has grass and flowers and trees and shrubbery, all maintained by the city, and a small playground. It is generally expected that Frederick will probably spend a fair amount of his time on the equipment there when he is a few years older.

The park is crisscrossed by walkways leading from each of the four corners, with heavy wooden benches at regular intervals, usually placed in pairs, whose steel legs are cemented in place. Retired men and women often sit on the benches to read or play chess or checkers or chat with their friends. Jessica also used the benches, having developed the habit of stopping at one of them during her walks in the park, there to sit and nurse her baby in the warm sunshine and relatively fresh air.

To her, there is nothing immodest in holding Frederick in her arms, baring a breast and nursing her baby. In Germany and most of Europe, it is looked on as a completely normal action on her part, and one to be encouraged. Even in the more puritan United States, breastfeeding in public is considered to be totally proper, and there are actually laws in some places excluding the partial nudity that is usually involved from the definition of indecent exposure.

One sunny Tuesday morning, as she sat feeding Frederick, a retired couple who lived in her apartment building strolled by. "Hello, Mrs. Jefferson. Hello Mr. Jefferson," she greeted them.

"Hello, Jessica," they responded, smiling at the peaceful and beautiful sight. To his wife, Mr. Jefferson seemed a bit too interested, and she clutched his arm and hurried him away. Had the young mother's breasts been not quite so big or quite so fair, she might not have done so, even though he was doing nothing more than enjoying the serenity of the scene.

Two more people, this time strangers, passed by and smiled at the mother and her baby, and their friendly expressions were reciprocated. Most people get a warm feeling from seeing a nursing mother, such as Jessica, because of the serenity and peacefulness of such a sight. There is nothing more harmonious than the sight of a woman nourishing her baby in the most natural of ways, and the sight makes most people feel good, and even tend to think there are some things that are still alright in the world.

Unfortunately, there are a relative few who think a woman who has her tits on display is a reasonable target for their own perversions. Two such people were William "Red" Murphy and Peter "Slim" Bellino. These two men, having nothing better to do that day, had left their more usual hangout, the skid row area a few miles away where they lived in a cheap hotel, and meandered their way to the more upscale neighborhood where the Graf family leased their apartment. The park looked attractive to them too, even before they caught sight of the hot young blonde who was showing off her tits.

When they set out that morning, either of the two men carried a fifth of cheap muscatel, but those two bottles had long ago been finished, with the empties having been left at a bus stop that happened to be the place where they had finished the last drops of the contents. Panhandling enough money to replenish their supply had not been difficult, but they had only begged enough to buy one fifth of wine for the two of them. Red happened to be holding it in his hand, concealed inside a paper bag in the usual manner, when they ambled into the neighborhood park where Jessica and baby Frederick were on a bench enjoying their togetherness and every other thing about the day.

The two men stopped, and both took a hefty swig of their elixir. Slim ended up holding the bottle and, when he lowered it from his mouth, he saw something that interested him more just then than the rest of the wine.

"Hey, Red," he addressed his companion while pointing at Jessica and her son. "Looky at them tits over there!"

The other drunk did as suggested and beheld a truly beautiful sight but, to him, the most intriguing thing were the breasts themselves, not the completely natural purpose to which they were being put. "Yeah, they're sure nice and big," he responded.

The two men quickly approached Jessica and her baby and stopped, standing a few feet from each other and less than five feet away from her and stared at her milk-white breasts. Feeling some trepidation about the closeness of the two men, she avoided making any eye contact. She also felt revulsion with their odor, which was a blend of urine and cheap wine, and with their appearance. One man was taller and bald except for an untidy fringe of brown hair, and the smaller man had long, dirty red hair. They were both unshaven and dressed alike, in stained suit coats and wrinkled pants with scuffed shoes. The pair looked and smelled and acted nothing at all like most of the people Jessica saw in a normal day.

They didn't talk like most people either. "Hey lady, can I suck your tits after the kid is done?" the taller man asked. He laughed at what he considered his clever bon mot.

"Yeah, me too," the red-haired man added. "And then I wanna fuck you." As if he needed to show the frightened woman what he intended to use for the latter, he unzipped his pants and pulled out his cock, which hung flaccidly from his open fly. He grinned and laughed also.

Jessica was shocked and frightened, and tried to cover up her exposed breasts. This dislodged young Frederick from his source of nourishment before he was finished, and he started crying. The foul selling men thought this was just as hilarious as could be, and started suggesting solutions to the problem.

"Hey, Lady, go ahead and feed him. We just wanna look at your titties," the bigger man told her.

"Yeah, and then we wanna fuck ya," added his pal. His limp cock made this seem highly unlikely, but Jessica was still frightened for herself and even more so for Frederick.

She looked desperately around, but she could see nobody who might help her. The park was never heavily populated at that time on a weekday, and there was nobody around but her and her tormentors. She thought of screaming for help, but believed there was nobody around who would hear her. She also thought, probably correctly, that such a thing might just goad the two men into doing more than talking. She wondered desperately whether there was any person nearby who would come to her aid.

There was. Officer Pauletta Johnson, a member of the city police and assigned to patrol the parks, had just entered from a different side than that used earlier by Red and Slim. She walked around a tall clump of shrubbery and beheld a highly disturbing sight. An attractive young woman with a baby was sitting on a park bench and appeared to be menaced by two shabby men, who looked like winos, and were certainly not from the surrounding neighborhood. She hurried forward to learn more about the situation and determine whether or not her services were needed.

"Awright, what's going on here?" she asked in her most police officer way.

"None of your fuckin' business, ya nigger bitch," Slim replied.

This was the wrong thing to say, on three counts. First, police officers very much dislike being addressed that way. Second, African-American women, of which Pauletta was one, especially don't like to be addressed that way. Third, and most relevant of all, his statement was factually incorrect. It was Officer Johnson's business, as a member of the police department and as a decent human being. Even so, she wanted to avoid trouble with the two men if she could.

"Move along, you two" she ordered the winos. "Go back downtown where you belong."

"Yeah? You gonna make us?" Slim retorted.

As he spoke, he transferred the bottle of wine, still in its paper bag, from his left to his right hand, where he held it by the neck, rather than by the barrel as he had been doing. That movement and the small adjustment in his stance were noticed by Pauletta and, by gripping the handle of her nightstick in her right hand, she prepared herself for what she was quite sure would happen next.

Her expectation was correct. Slim had not noticed the movement of the police officer's hand, and probably didn't care anyhow, since his foe was smaller than he and, after all, a mere woman. He stepped awkwardly forward and swung the bottle in a clumsy roundhouse swing, aimed at the head of the woman who had dared to interrupt his and his companion's fun. Pauletta easily ducked under his effort and swung her own, more effective, weapon in a hard uppercut that ended in a sickening thud against Slim's crotch. He fell to the ground, writhing in agony, all the fight gone from him.

Red didn't learn from his companion's fate and was still looking for trouble. He tried to grab the left arm of the police officer, but she easily twisted out of his way and used her nightstick effectively again. She cracked him hard on the side of his head, and he collapsed as his jug buddy had, with just as little fight left in him. Pauletta followed up her advantage by snapping one manacle of her handcuffs onto Slim's unresisting wrist and dragging him over to the end of the neighboring bench. There, she wrapped the chain around the imbedded steel leg and dragged Red over to lock his wrist in the other manacle. With both miscreants secured, she used her portable radio to call in the report, so a paddy wagon could haul them off to jail, where they would be charged with a long list of crimes.

She wasn't through yet, still having a few things that needed doing before her part of the incident would be over. Pauletta was still a police officer besides being a decent human being, and she had to be both those things when she spoke to Jessica. "Sorry about the trouble, Ma'am. Some people just don't know where they belong." As she spoke, she waved her arm at the two men.

Red had recovered enough that he was pleading with the police officer to let him go because he hadn't meant any harm, and trying to free his wrist from the manacle or untangle himself from the leg of the bench. Slim was conscious, but in no condition to run or do anything else except curse or whimper from his extreme pain. It was obvious neither of the men would be going anywhere until the police wagon got there to take them away, so Pauletta concentrated her attention on Jessica, who was still shaken from the unpleasant experience.

"I'm certainly glad you came along, officer..." After reading the name on the tag pinned to her rescuer's shirt, she finished her sentence. "Pauletta. I don't know what might have happened if you hadn't."

"Probably nothing, but with drunks like those guys, you never know." From the crying baby and the lady's unbuttoned blouse, she deduced what had probably been happening before the two men had begun harassing her. "Why don't you go ahead and finish feeding your baby? These two guys won't bother you now. They won't be bothering anybody for a long time."

Jessica was still shaken, but she also knew her priorities. Once again, she opened her blouse and held the baby up to her nipple. Unperturbed by what had almost happened to his mother, he resumed feeding. Pauletta smiled at the sight, partly for the same reason most others had but mostly because the scene reminded her of what she had enjoyed doing in a similar place only a few months earlier.

"You know, this is a good place to rest and nurse your baby. Well, it would be if it weren't for creeps like those two. In good weather, I used to like to go out to the park to breastfeed my daughters when I was on maternity leave."

"Oh? Do you live around here?"

"No, but there are a lot of little parks around like this one, and there's one near the apartment where my husband and I live. Anyhow, nursing like you're doing is the best thing for everybody involved, and even those who aren't. It's good for the baby and good for the mother. It's good for the environment too, because it doesn't involve any cans or bottles or other junk to clutter up the landscape. Besides that," she added, telling an old joke that Jessica hadn't heard before, "the milk for the baby comes in the most beautiful containers." She smiled in a friendly way at where Frederick had just finished his meal.

Minutes later, the wagon arrived, and Pauletta reverted from being a confidante and fellow mother to being completely a police officer. "I'll still need to get some information from you, Ma'am, in case these guys try to beat the rap. I don't expect them to do anything but cop a plea but, in case they don't, you might be called on to testify against them so we can get them off the street for a good, long while. With any kind of luck, they might even have some warrants against them, maybe enough to keep them locked up for a couple of years."

"I'll tell you anything you need to know. I certainly don't want them back on the street. Or in this park either."

Pauletta asked routine questions, such as name and address, and wrote down Jessica's version of her very bad experience. By the time she was finished with a penciled account of the incident, the two drunks, although they pleaded for "slack" and "a break" respectively, had been read their Miranda rights and then been loaded aboard the wagon. Pauletta, feeling good about what she had done that day, shook hands with Jessica and rode to the station with Red and Slim. She had been on foot patrol, so she would have to ride in the front seat to the city jail where she would submit her report.

Still shaken from the scary encounter with the two men and glad the cordial police officer had happened along, Jessica placed her sleeping baby in his stroller and returned home. She would continue to come back to the park, and would take Frederick there with her, but she would never feel as safe as she had until that morning.